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Hello to all eight of us! Thankfully, we’re all friends, because I know the site looks like a construction zone right now. We clearly haven’t got all the drywall up yet, so thanks for your patience! It’s two months away from the official launch in April, so that’s all I’ve got to say about that for now… You should expect to see some radical changes on the front end here in due time.

You can build your personal sites without having to worry about the main site. The architecture is solid, industry standard stuff, and there’s a clear upgrade path when things start taking off. The security is tight, there’s caching in place, and everything is being backed multiple times each day. Stable for a month now, and I even upgraded servers without a hitch, so the foundation looks good.

Despite appearances on the outside, there’s been some big changes on the inside:

All the themes are all installed. There are 75 free themes available to all members, and there are another 79 themes available on the upgrade (Pro Sites) path for people who need them for eCommerce or more business oriented sites. Yes, different themes have different capabilities.

All the major program plugins (Apps) are installed. Theses let you to add additional functionality to your website. More on that later, but we’re good to go for most things today. If there’s a feature you don’t see, but need, just talk to me. Not everything is enabled, and this is an evolving market, with new things coming out all the time.

Earlier this year, I read Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (available online here). Thankfully, the subject matter is neither of the title’s conjuncts. It’s actually a really good read. I particularly like the passage where he describes philosophical analysis through the metaphor of a ‘knife': (The following is quoted from Part I, chapter 7, pp. 69-71.)

The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us – these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road – aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts.

The handful of sand looks uniform at first, but the longer we look at it the more diverse we find it to be. Each grain of sand is different. No two are alike. Some are similar in one way, some are similar in another way, and we can form the sand into separate piles on the basis of this similarity and dissimilarity. Shades of color in different piles – sizes in different piles – grain shapes in different piles – subtypes of grain shapes in different piles – grades of opacity in different piles – and so on, and on, and on. You’d think the process of subdivision and classification would come to an end somewhere, but it doesn’t. It just goes on and on.

Just an update. Lots of attacks on our server since the site went up, but we have finally shut everything down. The caching seems to be kicking in nicely too. On another note, we’re working on an application that is going to let our members share all the great blogs that they find with all of our members. You can see some of the handiwork showing up in the blogroll on the home page.

What we are hoping to achieve is a system that will aggregate all the content nominated by our member community, and then put that content to our members for a vote, with the goal of coming to a consensus on what the Best Blog Ever, actually is! More on that later, but it’s pretty exciting from this side of the firewall.